You may want to do a standard search repeatedly on different sub-corpora.

Or as Concord allows an almost unlimited number of entries, you may wish to do a concordance involving many search-words or phrases.

The space for typing in multiple search-words is limited to 80 characters (including / etc.). If your preferred search-words will exceed this limit or you wish to use a standardised search, you can prepare a file containing all the search-words.

How to do it…

A sample (Documents\wsmith7\concordance_search_words.txt) is included with the distribution files.

Use a Windows editor (e.g. Notepad) to prepare your own. Each one must be on a separate line of your file. No comment lines can be included, though blank lines may be inserted for readability.

If you want to require a context for a given word, put context:= as in this example:

book context:=hotel

(which seeks book and only shows results if hotel comes in the context horizons).

Then, instead of typing in each word or phrase in the Search Word dialogue box, just browse for the file.

Then press Load to read the entries (or Clear if you change your mind).

Lemmas and file-based concordancing

Note that where Concord has been called up from WordList, and the highlighted word in the word list is the head entry with lemmas, a temporary file will be created, listing the whole set of lemmas, and Concord will use this file-based search-word procedure to compute the concordance. The temporary file will be stored in your Documents\wsmith7 folder unless you're running on a network in which case it'll be in Windows' temporary folder, e.g. \windows\temp. It's up to you to delete the temporary file.

Automated file-based concordances

If you want Concord to process a whole lot of different search-words, saving each result as it goes along so you can get a lot of work done with WordSmith unattended, choose SW Batch under Concordance Settings.